Interview: James Delingpole on The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism

"I'm not a scientist and actually given what I've seen of scientists in my experiences following the global warming scam, I'm glad I'm not a scientist because a lot of these guys are basically shysters and crooks. They're not some kind of white-coated elite with a special hotline to the truth. In fact, they're just ordinary guys and girls trying to earn a living like the rest of us but slightly more dodgily than the rest of us in the one or two egregious cases," James Delingpole of Ricochet.com, the UK Spectator and the executive editor the newly launched Breitbart London tells me in our latest interview. And that's one of the kinder things that the author of The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism: The Left's Plan to Frighten Your Kids, Drive Up Energy Costs, and Hike Your Taxes has to say on the subject. He'll also discuss:

● If Mark Steyn loses his lawsuit to Michael Mann, who gets the top bunk in their cell at the Global Warming Stalag, James or Mark?

● The concept of the "Friendly Lawsuit," and how it helps to explain that the left is nothing but Potemkin Villages, all the way down.

● Prying open "The Drawbridge Effect" to see what's inside Al Gore's and Thomas Friedman's mansions.

● How can the media alternately tell us the world is coming to an end in five years if we don't radically change our lifestyles, then cheerfully promote high-carbon footprint pro sports, such as the NFL and NASCAR?

● What's the background behind the big "Climategate" scandal of 2009, and where does it stand today?

● How James both discovered American politics while living in England and joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Note that there was a bit of distortion in the first minute or two of our interview, as I had my recording program initially dialed up to 11 in anticipation of the long distance call. I used my trusty Izotope RX application to clean up most of it, but traces of it remain. After the first minute or so, the sound quality settles down nicely.

If the above Flash audio player is not be compatible with your browser, click on the video player below, or click here to be taken directly to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

MR. DELINGPOLE: It really will be as if the apocalypse has come if the appalling Michael Mann wins the case against ‑‑ I mean it would be a bit like "Paradise Lost" revisited so that Satan somehow defeats God. I mean I'm not sure whether Mark Steyn would be comfortable being called God, exactly.

MR. DRISCOLL: I think he could handle that!

MR. DELINGPOLE: But I think the stakes here are pretty high. What we have is the most egregious and disgraceful example ‑‑ and this happens a lot, I'm afraid ‑‑ of the scientific and political establishment closing ranks to hide the truth from the little people. And the truth is basically this: there has been no global warming ‑‑ no global warming since 1997 or possibly 1996, depending on who you ask. And yet, all the predictions, projections, as they're known, of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, up until now, all of them have predicted ‑‑ have been based on man-made global warming theory which is that as anthropogenic CO2 levels increase, so inexorably will the world's temperature and eventually, we'll all fry, the ice caps will melt, the baby polar bears will drown and so will Tuvalu and the Maldives and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, the fact is that there has been this massive pause in global warming which suggests that anthropogenic global warming theory is a busted flush, which would suggest that the billions, if not trillions, of dollars which our governments have diverted on our behalf from our pockets, as taxpayers, have diverted to causes like Solyndra, for example, to building wind farms all over America and Britain which chump up bats and birds including your national bird, the bald eagle, these environmentalists who are supposedly saving the planet for so-called future generations are actually destroying the planet and destroying the economy and it is a massive scandal. I would say it's the biggest scientific scandal in history and probably the biggest economic scandal in history as well.

And people like Michael Mann are using the legal system to try and hide this fact. And if Mann wins, it will be a victory for the dark side, against ‑‑ against humanity.

MR. DRISCOLL: James, I don’t know if you follow Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com. But Glenn certainly helped to popularize the phrase that the American left is nothing but Potemkin Villages all the way down. One glaring example of that in TheLittle Green Book of Eco-Fascism was the concept of Friendly Lawsuits. Could you talk about how they work?

MR. DELINGPOLE: Friendly lawsuits. There's this sort of cozy relationship between the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and all the environmentalists NGOs like Greenpeace, WWF, you name them, they're all part of the same problem. And a lot of the employees at the Environmental Protection Agency are essentially green activists who have just become part of the government's machinery. And so what they do is they play Mr. Nasty and Mr. Nice when they're trying to, for example, close down the coal industry, which is one of their favorite hobbies. Greenpeace will threaten to sue the EPA ‑‑ I think I've got this right, haven't I? Greenpeace, or someone similar, is going to sue the EPA for not discharging its environmental duties towards such-and-such an industry. And the EPA, which, of course, is secretly expecting this legal threat, will then say, oh, we must take action. We can't help doing this because we've been threatened with this legal action; therefore, you must do this. So they work in tandem.

MR. DRISCOLL: There’s another term you use in TheLittle Green Book of Eco-Fascism called “The Drawbridge Effect,” which helps to explain why so many of the wealthy support radical environmentalism. I was going to say in spite of how it impacts the poor with higher prices, but the drawbridge effect helps to explains why the elite view this as a feature, not a bug.

MR. DELINGPOLE: I'm not a scientist and actually given what I've seen of scientists in my experiences following the global warming scam, I'm glad I'm not a scientist because a lot of these guys are basically shysters and crooks. They're not some kind of white-coated elite with a special hotline to the truth. In fact, they're just ordinary guys and girls trying to earn a living like the rest of us but slightly more dodgily than the rest of us in the one or two egregious cases.

But one of my missions has been not to find out all the obscure scientific detail, which I leave to the scientists, because I don't think it's my job, but what does interest me is a kind of analyst of the culture is asking the question: Okay, so if there is this massive environmentalist scam going on in the world right now ‑‑ and there is, let me tell you ‑‑ if there is a massive environmentalist scam, why do so many people fall for it? Why is the government involved? Why are the learned scientific institutions involved? Why are the schoolteachers involved? Why does Hollywood believe all this stuff? Why do people like Robert Redford and [Ted] Turner believe all this stuff? Why does Goldman Sachs get involved in this stuff? Why do all the big American charitable foundations fund this stuff? And there are lots of explanations for this but basically it comes down to money and it basically comes down to how you view the world.

I think the world divides ‑‑ Gilbert and Sullivan famously said that everyone ‑‑ every girl and boy ‑‑ "every girl and boy that is born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservat-ive," which is to say that some people believe in small government and free markets and other people believe in regulation and control, control by the state, control by an elect few rather than, as I believe, letting the market decide.

There's a lot of hypocrisy on the left, particularly people who have made their money on the left. They made their money and they espouse all these left-wing causes but at the same time they really don't want to share their money with the little people.

I mean you look at Ted Turner. Ted Turner wants to live in a world where he can buy up whole swathes of America ‑‑ of American countryside ‑‑ and then simply shut them down forever so that nobody else has access to them except privileged members of the Ted Turner family. And it's what I call "the drawbridge effect." It's the rich, once they've made their money, tend to try and stop anyone else having what they have.

It's always puzzled me why so many of the great American industrialists and bankers and so on, why it is that their descendants tend to end up not in industry, not in free markets, not in capitalism, but actually try to destroy the capitalist system.

So, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation is incredibly left wing. It gives to all these liberal causes. And the reason is that if you fund liberal causes you help ‑‑ you help throw a spanner in the works of the capitalist system and stop the effect that the capitalist system has which is make poor striving people richer. Does that make sense?

MR. DRISCOLL: Oh, absolutely. Does the Drawbridge Effect help explain the weird hypocrisy of the American TV networks, which go from telling us that the world will be ending in five years if we don’t radically change and cutback on our lifestyle, to covering professional football and NASCAR auto racing immediately afterwards, without batting an eye?

MR. DELINGPOLE: Yeah, well, I think that most media organizations in one way or another depend on shocking and surprising their ‑‑ well, actually, not surprising them because I think people are actually quite ‑‑ they quite like more of the same. But they like shocking their audience by telling them things like the world is doomed, experts say.

I asked earlier why it is that so many different people have fallen for this eco scam. I think the explanation of why the MSM has fallen for it is fairly obvious.

Number one, journalists tend to be lazy and stupid, certainly, this new generation. I think standards are slipping massively. Journalists don't do their due diligence any more. So that's one thing.

Another thing is that the MSM has traditionally swung liberal left. I mean thank God you've got talk radio in the U.S. and thank God you got independent web sites like PJ Media and Breitbart and so on because otherwise it would be nothing but leftist propaganda.

So because the MSM swings left that means you have them forging alliances with all the leftist institutions, all the lefty actors. You think of Leo DiCaprio on the cover of Vanity Fair with his baby polar bear and so on. So that's the second reason.

What is the third reason? If you announce to your readers that the world is ending tomorrow, then they're more likely to buy a copy of your newspaper than if you say actually, the world's doing pretty fine; don't bother yourself, don't sweat, kids.

MR. DRISCOLL: My favorite was NBC in 2007, which [as seen in the above video] had its lights off in its studio, except for the giant Toyota sign, since they were sponsoring the show, and urged us to all turn off the lights in our homes, which covering a Sunday night football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys, in a stadium with about a million watts of klieg lights burning to make the stadium look brighter than the noonday sun. Do the networks not get the disparity between their doomsday warnings, and the rest of their programming schedule?

MR. DELINGPOLE: Well, you might ask the same question about Al Gore. Does he not get the disparity between ‑‑

MR. DELINGPOLE: Yeah, or John Kerry. Look, these guys ‑‑ John Podesta, you name them, these ‑‑ the Obama administration, Obama donors or his friends at Goldman Sachs and so on ‑‑ these guys have made a fat fortune from the great climate scam. I mean, they probably have made the connection between their lifestyles and their politics. And the connection they've made is if you keep talking this absolute abject shite, if you become known as this visionary of the green apocalypse and you invest in various green industries like Solyndra, ha ha, then you will magically become very, very rich as a reward for it. Do you know what? I think if you can make as much money as Al Gore has after the climate scam, you can live with the knowledge that you are a total disgusting hypocrite. In fact, I think you can almost brainwash yourself into thinking that you're not a hypocrite. Money buys brainwashing as much as anything else.

MR. DRISCOLL: Back in 2009, there was Climategate, and for those who don't remember the big splash of Climategate which helped to introduce the phrase "hide the decline" into the general nomenclature, can you talk a little bit about it, how it eventually played out and where things stand today?

MR. DELINGPOLE: Yeah. So Climategate happened in 2009 and I was one of the journalists who was onto the story. I was the guy who popularized the name Climategate. Now, what Climategate was about was that an anonymous leaker calling himself "FOIA" as in Freedom of Information, he or she or it got this massive cache of private emails from places like the University of East Anglia and it's email exchanges between the scientists at the very heart of the climate scam. These are the guys who were the leaders on the IPCC's report and so on. And what these private emails revealed was a lot of things.

Firstly, it revealed that in private, these climate scientists aren't nearly as certain about global warming, man-made global warming, as they say in their public statements. In other words, even way back when, these guys were doubting the science behind their theory.

Another is that they have conspired together to shut out of the argument any dissenting scientists. I mean not just shutting them out of the argument but try to close down the journals where these guys work, try to deny these guys tenure at the universities, trying to destroy their careers. It's really messy, ugly stuff.

We also find them abusing the scientific method. In other words torturing the evidence till it screams, you might say. And you had examples of scientists actually admitting they'd lost data. Even scientists admitting that they had deleted e-mails to avoid being FOIA’ed.

So what all this suggested was that the supposedly whiter-than-white climate change establishment is actually as corrupt as sin.

Now, like all the people who've been following this story, I imagined that this would be the end of the climate scam but I had reckoned without the deviousness and corruption and effrontery and chutzpah of these scumbags, of these complete toerags. And one of the things these disgusting reptilian creatures did was that they closed ranks and commissioned these supposed neutral surveys.

There was one, I believe, at Penn State, there was one at on the University of East Anglia, there was one by the House of Commons in Britain. And what all these investigations were, in fact, was whitewashes. They were often funded by the very institutions which were trying to cover things up. So they actually paid friendly people large sums of money to come and investigate and come up with the right verdict.

So thereafter, people who wanted to sort of stand up for the lies and corruption of the climate establishment, could simply say, well, of course, there were four official inquiries and not a single one of these inquiries found anything wrong with these wonderful, truth-seeking, decent, noble scientists, and how dare these mere journalists, without even science degrees, how dare they criticize these wonderful men.

So the caravan trundled on and it trundles on to this day. We still have ‑‑ we still have corrupt scientists getting massive government grants, abusing the scientific method. We still have people making a fortune out of scams like the wind farm industry. There would not be a single wind farm in the land were it not for the fact that these things are massively subsidized by the taxpayer.

The corruption extends from government to business to the scientific institutions. It's a disgrace.

MR. DRISCOLL: James, I’m sure you’ve told this story before in other interviews, but how did you become interested in American politics, and how did you join the dark side of the force with us folks on the right-hand side of the aisle

MR. DELINGPOLE: Well, that's a very good question. Do you know what? They say that if you're not a socialist when you're eighteen, you're heartless and if you're not a conservative by the time you're thirty, you haven't got a brain, I never went through that socialistic period. I've always been, I suppose, a bit of a maverick.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be part of the establishment and I always thought that was where I was going to end up that somehow I was going to become a general in the army or a distinguished judge or maybe even a member of the government. And I don't know what went wrong, but I just didn't quite have the sort of ass-kissing tendency you need, I think, to get on in life. I've always questioned things. I've always been slightly difficult, and my kids, I'm afraid, have the same problem.

And I've always believed the most important thing ‑‑ I mean I don't think I've always articulated this, but I think in the back of my mind I've had this belief that we should all be free to do whatever the hell we want so long as it doesn't impinge on other people's rights to do whatever the hell they want, within reason, of course. And this, naturally, led me to the philosophy of, I suppose, libertarianism, classical liberalism that I espouse now.

I believe, as Ronald Reagan did, that government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem. And I've always ‑‑ since my first visit to America, I have ‑‑ I have always loved America. I feel like I'm coming home.

And when I did my first U.S. book tour, which is to promote a rather prescient book called Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work, I did quite a few talk radio shows then. And what I loved about the U.S. is that here I was among people whose natural reaction wasn't why are you lying to me you evil bastard? Why are you so being so right-wing, you right-wing scumbag? Instead, these people were listening to me and taking me seriously and kind of agreeing with my view of the world.

So I think in my heart of hearts, I am a kind of an honorary American. But then again, I like to think of Americans as Britain's children who've left home and done remarkably well.

I rent a house on a country estate. And in my local church, in the stained glass windows are these stars and stripes. And the reason that the stars and stripes are in my church window is that these are the stained glass windowpanes which come from Sulgrave Manor which, you may not be aware, was the ancestral home ‑‑ the family home of George Washington. Washington spent the first forty years of his life in England, and only then did he move to the U.S. where he did remarkably well.

And so I like to think of America as a continuation of the part of Britain I love. I think during the American War of Independence, I think I would probably have been a Minuteman fighting the redcoats because I don't like arbitrary authority and I would probably have been pouring the tea into the harbor because I don't believe in taxation without representation.

MR. DRISCOLL: Well, James, last question ‑‑

MR. DELINGPOLE: But that's how I got to America. Does that make sense?

MR. DRISCOLL: It absolutely does.

MR. DELINGPOLE: Oh, and one more thing.

MR. DRISCOLL: Absolutely.

MR. DELINGPOLE: The other thing you love, you love accents. I mean one can get away with murder.

MR. DRISCOLL: (Laughing).

MR. DELINGPOLE: When I was in DC for CPAC, I went to this party and just I felt like I was a member of the Royal Family just because of the way people reacted to the way I talk. So that's another reason. I mean how can you not love America?

MR. DRISCOLL: And James, last question; actually two questions to help wrap things up: To follow up on a term from TheLittle Green Book, you mention the Reverse Cassandra Effect. So Having been telling us that the sky was about to fall…any day now… since 1970, where does radical environmentalism go from here? And also, how do you see the earth’s climate itself shaking out in the near term?

MR. DELINGPOLE: Winter is coming, as we know, from watching Game of Thrones and also from actually looking at the solar cycles which are suggesting that we are in for a very long period of global cooling. When it becomes obvious beyond all reasonable or unreasonable doubt that the planet is cooling and global warming theory is a busted flush, all that will happen is that the greenies will move onto other things. They will start talking about sustainability, well, they already do, they will talk about species lost, they will talk about ocean acidification. They'll come up with new scares like the atrazine scare which is scientifically baseless. They will always find a way to abuse science. They will invoke science in order to advance what is essentially a political cause.

And whatever area of environmentalism I've dealt with, it has always come down to the same things. They ally themselves with superficially plausible scientists producing superficially plausible science which tells us, in one way or another, the Earth is doomed and it's all man's fault and unless we act now then this will happen. So we must act now, we must spend more money on research, we must use less fossil fuel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So it is ultimately the abuse of science to advance a political agenda and that political agenda is the agenda of the left, and that has changed little throughout history. There have always been people like that with a controlling instinct to try and boss people around, to take people's freedom away, to impose various forms of tyranny on those of us who love freedom. And our duty as freedom lovers is to fight them, I'm afraid, “to the death.” I don't mean we need to kill them, but I mean I think this is a very serious battle which needs to be taken very, very seriously because if we stop fighting, we are doomed.